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If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

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Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#121

Post by crankylinuxuser »

i_phish_cats wrote: post #114
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #91

Government scientist here. IANAL, but my understanding is that all software written by US government civil servants is in the public domain. It cannot be copyrighted or otherwise licensed (although the government can patent things). This does not necessarily mean that it is available to the public, as noted in the other comments; it may be classified, considered For Official Use Only, or restricted from release by IT…

Anything written by federal contractors, and anything written with state funds are not in the public domain. National labs flat out refuse to release some of their source code.

And there's the way around public domain, open data, and free citizen access and usage requirements.

The contractors don't have to be.

It's the same reason why most people stay out of federal jobs - you can't make more than the president. But if you're a consultant working for the gov't, you can get paid $$$$$.

Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#124

Post by dwheeler »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #91

Government scientist here. IANAL, but my understanding is that all software written by US government civil servants is in the public domain. It cannot be copyrighted or otherwise licensed (although the government can patent things). This does not necessarily mean that it is available to the public, as noted in the other comments; it may be classified, considered For Official Use Only, or restricted from release by IT…

Mostly sortof true, but there are lots of complications.

I've delved into this. For lots of detail on the current situation, see my paper, "Publicly Releasing Open Source Software Developed for the U.S. Government" by David A. Wheeler, https://www.csiac.org/journal-article/publicly-releasing-ope...

In almost all cases, if a US Federal employee writes software as part of his/her official duties, then there is no copyright IN THE UNITED STATES. There are a few exceptions (e.g., US Post Service Employees). Also, copyright doesn't apply in the US - but outside is a different matter (though enforcing said copyright is more complicated, and I would argue the US shouldn't try). More importantly, there may not be a copyright, but that doesn't guarantee release to the public (and often there isn't). You can ask via a FOIA, but that's no guarantee you'll get it.

HOWEVER: Most software developed by government funds is developed, at least in part, by contractors. And that is a COMPLETELY different circumstance. The details, unsurprisingly, depend on the contract.

If you're interested in the DoD, I suggest going to the MIL-OSS mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mil-oss

It's possible to release software to the public. One approach is to get pre-approval where "as long as the changes meet this scope, and follow these rules, it's okay to post the changes." But you have to get local buy-in.

In short: In a lot of places in the US federal government it's definitely difficult to do what in the rest of the world is normal.

In the US, state/local/tribal is completely different, and I definitely don't claim to know the laws of other countries. Others can explain that better.

Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#125

Post by kemiller2002 »

ar_lan wrote: post #102
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #91

Government scientist here. IANAL, but my understanding is that all software written by US government civil servants is in the public domain. It cannot be copyrighted or otherwise licensed (although the government can patent things). This does not necessarily mean that it is available to the public, as noted in the other comments; it may be classified, considered For Official Use Only, or restricted from release by IT…

I used to work in a state government job as a student intern, and they said they wanted an internal directory for some various tasks. You can think of it like an inventory manager sort of website, purely on our intranet. The mad lad my lead was, said we would need a database for retaining some of the basic data we needed to keep track of. Nothing all that special, just a few tables, and by nature nothing sensitive wo…

I used to be a contractor and worked on a web application distributed across multiple web servers. We needed a state server at the time to hold some cached information and share it among the servers. Now there was a rule that said a web server was not directly allowed to communicate with the database. Okay I get it, that makes sense.

The state server we were going to use to store some application metadata had the word "database" in the product name. For that reason alone we got flat out rejected.

I said to them, "So it's OK to store all the stuff we need in memory and on the file system on the servers, just not stored in the state server."

Their response was, "Yes, because it's not in a database."

We finally switched to another product that did not have the word database in the name, and they were completely fine with it.

Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#126

Post by tracker1 »

uberman wrote: post #117
tracker1 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, if YOUR government uses Linux, but doesn't participate in Linux development, it's bad for everyone else? Most Linux users aren't contributing to Linux itself. And likely less than half are making any significant contribution to Open Source Software at all. It's still useful software, and I still appreciate everyone that does work on it.

You seem to be conflating my position on the use of public funds with your position on open source in general. "So, if YOUR government uses Linux, but doesn't participate in Linux development, it's bad for everyone else?" I'm not sure where you are going with this. I certainly never claimed that governments should not use open source software. By all means I hope (for argument sake let's call it The US) leverages Lin…

Users who don't contribute back, aren't removing what you have done, or a given government may have funded. Some governments ARE contributing to open-source... other governments using open-source doesn't undo or degrade things.

We are not in a communist/socialist world where every community must pay at the point of a gun for things they don't choose to pay for. And if some government wants to force users of software they develop to contribute to funding, then there licensing should probably be something to reflect that. But then it wouldn't strictly be OSI/Open-Source.

Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#127

Post by sdinsn »

capdeck wrote: post #83
dragontamer wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. https://www.healthcare.gov/developers/ 2, 3, and 4 are made by private companies. Not government. 5. Probably a good idea.

> 2, 3, and 4 are made by private companies. Not government. But government pays them to develop the code. For many such companies government is the only customer (whom else are you going to sell the traffic light software to?).

> But government pays them to develop the code.

That's an assumption that isn't always true.

The company could have developed them with their own funds, then sell the product to the government.

Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#128

Post by dwheeler »

unreal37 wrote: post #105

An unpopular opinion I guess, but the article is saying if you receive government funding, it should be open source. That's more than just government employees making code. It's also any company, individual or agency that even accepts $1 of public grant money or any external contracts. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of coders who's daily job is partially funded by the government having to push their code p…

No, you just reduced the costs of everything. ONLY the code the government paid for development is being discussed. If 1% of the development was paid for by direction of the government, then at most we're talking 1%.

The bigger problem today is that the government re-builds things 1000 times.

Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#129

Post by dwheeler »

I'm surprised no one has mentioned code.gov - see https://code.gov/

This is part of the implementation of M-16-21, which said, "Each agency shall release as OSS at least 20 percent of its new custom-developed code each year for the term of the pilot program. (3 years)".

Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#130

Post by sdinsn »

kuwze wrote: post #122

Actually companies throw fits when the government contributes to open-source, especially when it comes to lucrative defense related stuff [0]. [0]: https://www.wired.com/2012/07/nsa-accumulo-google-bigtable/

That case is not at all related, please read more carefully:

> the committee questions whether Accumulo runs afoul of a government policy that prevents federal agencies from building their own software when they have access to commercial alternatives

The law exists to prevent wasting time & money, it has nothing to do with being open source.

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